A mysterious entity, deliberately avoiding the soul-sucking trappings of social media, PAV have a clear and highly specific poetic vision, and offers up something sinuous and sublime here – their first offering from an album exploring the poetry of Federico García Lorca.
Despedida – or Farewell – is a suitably enigmatic starting point: romantic, deceptively simple, leaving space for the mind to meander down the lyrical tributaries it offers. And the music, too, reflects that – a flowing, repeated pattern that offers subtly mesmerising shifts as it builds. Gently plucked strings shimmer and pulse around a rhythm that feels baked in the same Andalusian sun as the poet who inspired them.
This feels like secretive music somehow, as subtle creaks and sonic fissures add to the intimacy; yet this is work that clearly wishes to be heard. It’s a concept full of deliberate contradictions. The repeated phrase: ‘If I die, leave the balcony open…’ is a case in point. These words (though I’m aware that translations always risk a dilution of poetry’s purpose) capture so much; they are fatalistic but also full of hope- they offer, even in despair, a sense of endless possibility.
Lorca’s work was as political as it was personal—an unavoidable reality —but it is the potent romanticism of “Despedida” and the song that surrounds it that pulls at the heart hardest here. It possesses a gnomic intensity – a distillation of love and loss and life and longing that you can’t help but be drawn to. I look forward to hearing the album in full come October.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
